And right again: The tweet was from microbial ecologist Vanessa
Bailey, who manages PNNL's Microbiology group in the Biological Sciences
Division. She delivered one of three talks by PNNL scientists on Tuesday, the
symposium's second of four days this week. (Attendees have Wednesday Aug. 24
off to sightsee and to confer offline.)

The Aug. 22-26 professional gathering at Palais des congrès
de Montréal, dubbed ISME16, has drawn more than 2,000 attendees from around the
world, including Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, New Zealand, and
Russia. So far they have crowded into roundtables, invited talks, poster
sessions, and other venues for exchanging information about the microbial
universe, which affects the environment, our health, and the nature of Earth's
climate.

The ISME16 Twittersphere on Tuesday was lively too, with tweets
that occasionally strayed from enzyme profiles and diel cycling into the
problems of managing microbiology and family at the same time.

During Tuesday's sessions, PNNL was represented at the
podium by Bailey, who delivered a 30-minute talk to a very large audience; by EMSL
chief scientist David
A. Stahl, who holds a dual appointment at the University of Washington; and
by Aaron
Wright, a scientist and proteomics expert.

"Talk was great," Bailey reported later in a quick email. "I
got some twitter love!"

And what was not to love? For one, the presentation title had
a sonorous ring: "Integration of soil metagenomic and chemical data to identify
microbial processes altered by simulated climate change after an 18-year soil
transplant." Bailey and others published a paper this spring on
the same experiment. The research was updated in the conference talk, and also
acknowledged PNNL co-authors Lisa Bramer, Sarah Fansler, Nancy Hess, Alejandro Heredia-Langner,
Lee Ann McCue, and Malak Tfaily.

Stahl
delivered a talk on ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA), single-celled organisms
that are part of an abundant domain of creatures morphologically similar to
bacteria. AOA, fully described only 11 years ago, may be "major contributors to
the atmospherically active gases methane and nitrogen oxides," wrote Stahl in
an abstract. In his talk, he presented recent findings about how these
consequential AOA microorganisms are distributed, and how they act, in natural
systems.

Wright, a chemical biologist, delivered a talk entitled
"Activity-based probing reveals new contributions for vitamin B12 in modulation
of microbial protein activity and gene regulation." Within microbes and
microbial communities, vitamin B12 is "a requisite and precious
commodity," he wrote. Despite its importance, the many likely roles of vitamin
B12 in microbial metabolism and gene regulation are not well
understood. Wright described a strategy for learning more: an activity-based
probe that mimics vitamin B12 and can be used to sweep up proteins
likely tied to important microbial functions.

Poster sessions are a staple activity at science conferences,
giving voice to many new additional projects and research. At ISME16, with
authors standing by, 10 PNNL posters are on display, including those that touch
on microbial activity in thawed permafrost, prairie pothole region lakes, biofilm,
and hypersaline ecosystems. Another 13 posters on display include contributions
from PNNL scientists.